Dawn, your System Administrator was right – our humble printer is capable of OCR. I was astonished, and delighted, and am rarin’ to go. I did two pages last night as an experiment – the pages of the typescript are yellowed and fragile, but perfectly clear, and the necessary post-scan proofreading was minimal. There’s much I must now learn about formatting and such – I’m much happier helping my husband with Word Perfect 4.2 for DOS than struggling with margins and indentations in a modern word processor, but I’ll get it in the end. I don’t even know what “rich text format” is, yet – that’s what those two scanned pages seem to have wound up as.

I’ve got web authoring software for my now-neglected webpages. It may be I can simply import it into that and format it in HTML.

MamaLu, thank you for the offer of help. I am very touched, and may well get back to you on that as things unfold.

And Holly, yes, the subject of the book (Brigham Young’s wives) ought to be interesting, but my mother never succeeded with it, even when she was a published author and Women became a fashionable subject. My sister says that’s because the book is poor quality, and boring. Could be. I read some of it, maybe all, in early adolescence, and remember it as mildly interesting. I look forward to re-visiting it. Meanwhile, I have wrapped the fragile pages carefully away from the killer sunlight for the time being.

Knitting

I gather that new issues of both VK and Knitter’s are on their way. Knitter’s is always the slowest of all, but VK is distributed from London and is usually pretty prompt. I’ve started rushing to the door when I hear the daily thump of junk mail on the mat.

I’m knitting those roundels into my sister’s shawl. The picked-up stitches turned out to be short by four, a perfectly acceptable margin of error.

I discover that the Amedro pattern is written in st st, apart from the edging. I must have knit it that way twice. But when I substituted patterns from the book “Heirloom Lace” for Hellie's shawl, I used one which is “knitted lace” rather than “lace knitting” – I think I’ve got those terms the right way around, but who knows. At any rate, if I had done that one in st st I would have had to do lacey things on the purl rows, and that I’m sure I didn’t do. So I’ve committed myself to garter stitch from the beginning on this one, and this time I’ll make myself some adequate notes on the subject.

Non-knit

Katherine, thank you for the help with my Italian radio project. My husband found a small paragraph in the Scotsman which confirms what you say about Berlusconi and Chinese babies, although it didn’t mention what the bambini bolliti were supposed to be used for. I don’t know what they’re talking about this morning.